For someone who was supposedly dead, John Darwin packed a lot into the five years he was missing.

The former prison officer travelled to Gibraltar to buy a boat, was reported to have enjoyed a transatlantic fling with an American penpal, and paid £200,000 for a tropical estate in Panama before handing himself in to police on December 1 last year.

For all that time the balding, paunchy father of two, 57, was holed up in a cramped bedsit hideaway connected to his wife Anne’s seafront home by a secret door detectives later found boarded up with newspapers dated February 2007.

Borrowing from the plot of the Frederick Forsyth spy thriller The Day Of The Jackal, he even assumed the identity of a dead child, John Jones, and strolled the streets of his home town wearing a beard and walking with a limp, confident he would not be recognised by neighbours who believed him dead at sea.

The canoeist disappeared from home on March 21 2002, sparking a massive search and rescue operation.

The prison officer, then aged 51, was reported missing when he failed to arrive for his night shift at Holme House Prison, Stockton.

He was last seen on the beach near his home at Seaton Carew, Hartlepool, pushing his red, home-made boat out to sea.

Five RNLI lifeboats, two coastguard rescue teams from Hartlepool and Redcar, a police fixed-wing aircraft with heat-seeking equipment and teams of police officers joined the search.

On May 7, the shattered remains of Mr Darwin’s boat, described variously as a canoe and a kayak, were found washed up close to the beach in Seaton Carew.

The police inspector who lead the inquiry into Mr Darwin’s disappearance, Detective Inspector Bob Bussey, later said he always believed the canoe damage was "man-made" and on September 20 2002 renewed his appeal for information, saying he wished to speak to potential witnesses who had not yet come forward.

Mr Darwin’s wife Anne said she believed her husband was dead - and said she was shocked when he returned home three months later, to live secretly in a bedsit she owned in the house next door, separated from the family home by a hidden hole in the wall.

But the truth was a little different from the fiction the Darwins invented.

"Anne Darwin picked John Darwin up from North Gare and took him to Durham railway station," said Detective Inspector Andy Greenwood, who led the investigation into the Darwins.

"He would say he went to stay under canvas in the Lake District.

"But we don’t actually know what he did. I suspect he probably went to stay at one of the houses he owned in County Durham for a couple of days.

"It is likely that within a few days he was back in Seaton Carew living in the bedsit adjoining their home.

"A month after his disappearance, he was living the life of John Jones. He obtained a library card from Hartlepool in the name of John Jones.

"He convinced a librarian at the library that he was John Jones. She was that convinced that he was John Jones that she signed his passport application."

The real John Jones was born in Sunderland on March 27 1950 to Alfred and Lily Jones but lived for just a few weeks.

The infant died from infective enteritis and was buried at Sunderland Cemetery, where in 2003 John Darwin found his gravestone. The passport was issued on October 13 - just six months after he was officially declared dead.

Mrs Darwin said gaining the passport had been simple: "He used our home address and sent off an application and he got one. It was as simple as that."

Mr Darwin was pictured on the passport wearing a long, bushy beard and it allowed him to travel the world - travelling to Gibraltar, the US and Panama.

Former convent girl Mrs Darwin said her husband used the beard, and walked with a limp, to disguise himself whenever he left home.

He was spotted in 2003 by a former colleague from Holme House prison, Stockton.

Mrs Darwin told officers the colleague had made a mistake, having spotted a "cousin who looked just like him".

Another man, a tenant of the block of bedsit flats, Lee Wadrop, recognised Darwin and asked him "aren’t you supposed to be dead?" to which Mr Darwin replied "don’t tell anyone about this". Wadrop said he did not tell the police because he "did not want to get involved".

When detectives examined the passport to piece together Mr Darwin’s movements during his disappearance, it is understood it showed he had travelled several times to Panama and that he had visited Gibraltar to buy a yacht in 2005.

Boat dealer Robert Hopkin, 37, of Marina Bay, Gibraltar, was astonished when, after Mr Darwin’s arrest last December, police followed a paper trail which led them to his office.

He remembered a Mr Jones approached him and appeared willing to pay up to £50,000 to buy a boat - a catamaran called The Boonara, built in the 1970s - using money held in his wife’s name.

"Essentially, the deal fell down because there were a few items on the boat he wanted to keep - treasured items belonging to the boat’s owners and they wouldn’t sell," said Mr Hopkin.

"The sort of boat he was looking at was definitely a boat you could happily go long-term cruising on - possibly round the world - and certainly disappear from society if you wanted to.

"It’s quite easy to do on a large boat like that.

"I have a copy of the bank transfer correspondence. I even supplied them with flight details.

"If the sale had gone through, we would have required his home address and passport number as well as his occupation."

In the meantime, Mr Darwin was reported to be spending hours playing interactive internet games with opponents from all over the world.

Mrs Darwin said he became so friendly with one of his online opponents, a woman from Kansas, that he flew to America to visit her.

In 2006 the bedsit home next to Darwin’s seafront home was transferred into the name of his son, Mark Darwin.

On March 9 2006 he is reported to have signed a planning objection to a neighbour’s plans while using a false name.

Four months later, on July 14 2006, Mr and Mrs Darwin flew from Newcastle to Panama, where they were photographed by a Panamanian property agent.

The picture was later drawn to the attention of the world when a member of the public typed in John, Anne and Panama to her computer and the photograph appeared on a Google image search.

It is believed the couple made further trips to the Central American republic in February, March, and July last year, when they are reported to have bought a two-bedroom apartment in El Dorado, for £50,000, using a shell company formed in 2005, Jaguar Properties.

That summer the bedsit house next to the Seaton Carew home was sold, in the name of the Darwins’ son, Mark. The proceeds from the sale were transferred to Panama.

In the spring the couple purchased a £200,000 tropical estate in the village of Escobal, Colon, near the Panama Canal, with the intention of building a hotel from where canoeing holidays could be run.

At the end of last October, the Darwin family home was sold for £295,000 - bringing the total raised by the sale of both houses to about £450,000.

Cleveland Police had by then reopened the case, after a female colleague of Mrs Darwin’s at Gilesgate Medical Centre in Durham reported overhearing her speaking on the telephone to her "dead" husband.

A Panamanian woman living in the El Dorado apartment block, Patricia Centella, told reporters she had met Mr Darwin, who was a neighbour, and he told her he planned to buy a farm.

She said the last time she saw the couple together was in the final weekend of November, a few days before Mr Darwin, looking "tanned and relaxed" handed himself in to police.